Author: bananaslums

Dear all,

TL;DR: ACTION ITEM: ORGANIZE A MEETING WITH YOUR DEPARTMENT CONCERNING DEPARTMENT PLEDGES.

Linked here are all 22 pledges signed by departments in solidarity with fired graduate student workers, and a letter from STEM graduates at UCSC.

You have probably heard by now that on Friday the administration announced the firing of 54 graduates, before sending out 44 notices of intent to dismiss grads from spring appointments. In addition to this, an undisclosed number of graduates received notice that their spring appointments will be blocked, bringing the number of fired grads well beyond 54, and possibly as high as 80.

At least 16 pledges are now active and no fewer than 411 graduate student workers are committed to declining appointments next quarter, in one form or another, until fired grads are reinstated. This total includes at least 176 “hard pledges” to refuse any spring quarter appointment in the event of mass firing.

This moment demands the most meaningful form of solidarity. Fired graduate students have conviction in the knowledge that we are not alone on this campus. 

This is also a critical juncture for the future of public higher education. It is a decisive moment in the broader fight for a system of public education that adequately funds graduate research and education—one that supports diverse and international scholarship, and that is run by and for researchers and educators.

We call upon departments to meet immediately to review their pledges and start to organize their fulfillment, and possibly expanding them in light of yesterday’s firings.

On Monday we will send out a form to assess the needs and positions of those who refuse TA/GSIships.

A list of pledges:

All pledges:

Anthropology, Astronomy, BME, Chemistry, Computational Media, CSE, Earth & Planetary Sciences, Education, EEB, ENVS, FDM, Fem Studies, HAVC, Histcon, History, Literature, MCD Biology, METX, Music, Politics, Psychology, Sociology.

Active pledges:

Anthropology, Astronomy, Chemistry, Computational Media, CSE, Earth & Planetary Sciences, FDM, Fem Studies, HAVC, Histcon, History, Literature, Music, Politics, Psychology, Sociology.

Possibly active (depending on the termination of a member of their department):

BME, ENVS.

“Hard” Pledges:*

Anthropology, Computational Media, Feminist Studies, History of Consciousness, Literature, Psychology, Sociology

*Computational Media and Psychology’s pledges stated that they would refuse TAships, GSIships and readerships only in their departments (besides not taking up fired labor). Literature had stated they would also refuse GSRships; at the request of the collective, literature’s pledging grads retracted this and informed grads and the department of this today. The other hard pledges commit to declining all spring appointments other than GSRs.

Doomsday came and went, or was deferred until Thursday. 

Wildcat strikers stared down the UC’s biggest possible threat—mass termination—and the UC blinked, at least for now, as EVC Lori Kletzer this morning released a series of “clarifications” on the terms of her mass firing threat.

In a meeting with department chairs today, Kletzer made it clear that the $2,500 program is not a COLA designed to alleviate rent burden, nor is it an offer in response to our demand for a COLA. It is, in her words, an “incentive to go back to work.” 

If the last doomsday was the stick-version of strikebreaking (Kletzer today: “I want this strike to end”), then this is the carrot. No doubt we prefer carrots to sticks, but this is not much of a carrot.

This “program” excludes MA students as well as graduate students in their sixth year and beyond, many of whom have been delayed in their studies precisely because of the housing market in Santa Cruz. Furthermore, there is no transparency about the length of this program. Like any merely academic program, it may be revoked any year, or under the next austerity-dictated budget. It is not even a promise of non-retaliation: none of the disciplinary measures through the student code of conduct process will be paused or stopped, and disciplinary suspensions for arrestees will not be lifted.

In meetings with various academic divisions today, Kletzer repeatedly and consistently confirmed that this was neither an offer nor part of any future negotiation with strikers. Rather, this is a program that UCSC will roll out regardless of strikers’ input, with the caveat that any present or future wildcat striker, in addition to facing the prospect of dismissal, will not be eligible for this funding. Instead of opening good-faith negotiations with a collective of strikers to end the strike once and for all, the administration has simply unveiled a tactic designed to bribe individual strikers into returning to work. 

Annual rents in Santa Cruz increase by $2,500 every few years (or sooner, depending on the landlord). This “incentive” does almost nothing to address the reasons most of us went on strike in the first place.

Grads at multiple UC campuses are meeting tonight and throughout this week to decide their escalation in response to our strike and our plight here at Santa Cruz. If last week was an indication of how much the administration might be willing to budge, another week of mass action and the threat of mass action at other campuses may just tip the scales in our favor. 

We might be hearing some news very soon.

At our General Assembly on February 21, COLA wildcat strikers at UCSC voted overwhelmingly to continue to withhold Fall grades beyond Janet Napolitano’s midnight deadline. 

At least 85 UCSC graduate student workers, and very likely more, have refused to submit to Napolitano and EVC Kletzer’s threat to revoke Spring appointments and block future ones. Nearly 20% of these workers are international graduate students, who now face the risk of de facto deportation. 

We are now past Napolitano’s firing deadline. Until we hear otherwise, we hereby consider ourselves terminated from our employment. 

But the momentum of the struggle is growing. We feel the collective strength of our fellow workers who have committed to act decisively in solidarity. And while the decision of strikers on the firing line underlines our resolve, it does not express the full scale of the movement for COLA. 

It does not include the 351 UCSC graduate workers who committed at the start of this quarter to withhold Winter grades, and the additional numbers who will undoubtedly be moved to withhold grades after recent events. 

It does not include the dozen departments across UCSC refusing to accept Spring appointments if UCSC terminates their colleagues—nor the rumblings of faculty organizing autonomously and across disciplines, nor the commitment of thousands of professors across the country to effectively boycott UCSC when our spring employment is void. 

Nor does it include the mass commitments of several other UC campuses to commence grading and teaching strikes in solidarity with UCSC wildcats. 

And it does not begin to capture the force of our Doomsday Rally, where over 1000 undergrads, grads, faculty, lecturers, and workers shut down both entrances to campus, leading to the cancellation of all classes on Friday. Nor the mass rallies, pickets, and building occupations across the UC on Friday and throughout last week.

We already knew, and UC now surely knows, that we are stronger than they are—that we will not submit to police violence or threats to our employment. The time to strike with us is now, because we’re striking to win.

Dear Janet Napolitano and UC community,

It has come to our attention that the University of California administration intends to negotiate the COLA demands, initiated at UC Santa Cruz, with the UC Graduate and Professional Council (UCGPC). For many reasons including, but not limited to, the fact that this organization does not represent our campus in any leadership or representational capacity, we are sorry to inform you that any decisions at which you may collectively arrive will not impact our organizing or our conviction. We have explicitly and intentionally chosen for several years not to become members of this organization, we do not pay dues, and our External Vice President does not sit on its board. Furthermore, UCGPC has nothing to do with the COLA campaign, has refused contact since its inception, and continues to fail to recognize our needs.

We continue to welcome negotiations directly with striking graduate students at UCSC, and continue to assure our comrades that all substantive decisions related to the strike will be put to a democratic vote.

No COLA; no grads,

UCSC Graduate Student Association

UAW-2865 Santa Cruz

Striking graduate students

****Please Forward Widely****

Dear Colleagues,

We write to share our concern over the two recent communications (“An Open Letter to Faculty, Staff and Students at UC Santa Cruz” from President Napolitano and “Graduate Student Strike Update” from iCP/EVC Kletzer, both dated February 14th) that threaten to dismiss Teaching Assistants who have not submitted Fall grades by February 21st from their Spring 2020 appointments. These two letters raise serious questions about the future of our campus. We cannot deliver high-quality undergraduate education without the face-to-face learning and evaluation provided by the talented and committed graduate student teachers who are themselves vital to UCSC’s nationally and internationally recognized doctoral programs and to our status as a research university.  The proposed EVC response to fall grades and the wildcat strike runs directly counter to our values and purpose.  

The administration’s proposed action will cause deep and lasting harm to both undergraduate and graduate education at UCSC (well beyond the disruption currently caused by the Teaching Assistants’ strike). In this time of increasing enrollment pressure at the undergraduate level and the necessity for large classes (as well as small research-oriented seminars), faculty cannot mount a quality curriculum that serves undergraduates without the indispensable pedagogical support of graduate student labor. Over the last few years, TAs in nearly every graduate program on campus have received enhanced field-specific training founded in research on effective and inclusive teaching. As a result, TAs have made immeasurable contributions toward  closing the equity gaps and ensuring success for an increasingly diverse undergraduate student body.

In addition to damaging undergraduate education, the proposed punitive actions will also severely erode, if not permanently damage, the doctoral mission of the University of California.  UCSC has been on a strong trajectory of doctoral growth and it boasts a diverse and robust set of programs. All of them stand to suffer as a result of the proposed actions.  Striking graduate students have already been negatively impacted by their rent burden and low wages; to dismiss them from their Spring 2020 positions only compounds the financial reasons that led to the wildcat strike in the first place. We fear that many graduate students will simply be unable to continue their education as a result. This year’s cohort of prospective graduate students may also be reluctant to accept offers, causing further damage to individual departments, undergraduate curricula, and UCSC’s strong and growing reputation as a major research university.  

As faculty, we are further concerned that the proposed measures constitute an infringement of the principle of shared governance, which grants Senate faculty the right to oversee curriculum and courses of study. Regents Standing Order 105.2 states: “The Academic Senate shall authorize and supervise all courses and curricula.”  The action threatened by the administration would have profound effects on our courses and curricula, constituting a change in the delivery of instruction. As such, it is not a step that should be taken without thoughtful and extensive Senate consultation and consent.

Graduate students, with the support of undergraduates, lecturers, staff, and faculty, have drawn attention to a long-standing problem. The current crisis offers us an extraordinary opportunity to come together as a community to reimagine the future of UCSC and, through honest and frank dialogue, construct the paths that will return UCSC to its place as an institution dedicated to knowledge in the service of social transformation.

It is our belief that even faculty who do not support the strikers and their tactics ought to be deeply concerned about the implications of these letters for the quality of education on this campus. We hope you will join us in insisting on faculty consultation and shared governance in this matter. We also invite you to affirm the critical importance of graduate Teaching Assistants to the educational mission of the University of California and to urge systemwide and local campus accountability, compassion, and creative problem-solving.

We hope you will attend the Academic Senate Meeting on Wednesday, February 19, to raise some of these concerns with campus leadership.

Sincerely,

The Faculty Organizing Group (FOG)

Dear Lori Kletzer, Cynthia Larive, and Quentin Williams:

I am an eighth-year PhD candidate in the Department of History and I write to you just weeks away from filing my dissertation and completing my degree. As someone who researches the history of the Black Panther Party, the labor mobilizations over the past two months have given me even more of an opportunity to critically reflect on our university’s fifty-five year history and its relationship to the Bay Area’s legacy of social and political activism.

I’m sure you all are aware that given our school’s geographic proximity to Oakland and its establishment just months prior to the emergence of the Black Power Movement, UC Santa Cruz is an important part of this rich local and national history. The connections between our school and the movement’s calls for racial and class equity go beyond these spatial and temporal parallels, however. In fact, one of the co-founders of the BPP, Huey Newton, received his PhD from our world-renowned History of Consciousness program. Not long after Newton completed his degree, Dr. Angela Davis—not a Panther herself but an active and visible ally of the Party—joined our school’s faculty contingent, marking the beginning of her 17-year career in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies programs. While Dr. Davis no longer teaches full-time, as a distinguished professor emerita she maintains an active presence in our campus community, producing scholarship and building coalitions around the issues of wealth disparity, racial violence, and mass incarceration in the United States- the same issues that she and Newton fought against fifty years ago. 

In 2016 our very own McHenry Library hosted a photograph exhibition in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party. For the exhibit’s opening and closing receptions former Black Panthers spoke to our undergraduate and graduate students as well as UCSC faculty and staff about their community organizing work during the Black Power Movement. They further encouraged our students to stay engaged in community issues, emphasizing the urgent need for young people’s participation in grassroots measures geared toward mitigating food and housing insecurity in Santa Cruz. Your administrative colleagues in the Division of Graduate Studies provided necessary and much appreciated funding for both events.  

As I conclude my second year on the academic job market, one of the most common pieces of advice I’ve come across from tenure-track faculty is the importance and necessity of gearing your application to the values, interests, and expressed needs of the campus to which you’re applying. This, I have heard, holds especially true for your interview with campus administrators, if you make it that far along in the application process. When UCSC’s faculty, students, and staff asked you why you wanted to work at UCSC, how did you respond? What answers did you offer our campus community, especially considering that over the past few decades UCSC administrators have been deeply complicit in perpetuating the housing and food insecurity experienced by an exponentially increasing proportion of our student body? 

I ask you this with genuine curiosity because as I sit at my desk reviewing the images in my dissertation from the BPP’s newspaper, I see chronicles of 1970s Oakland. I see the Party’s documentation of the city’s lack of affordable housing and the effects of profiteering and negligent landlords on local families. I see a visual record of the Panthers’ self-organized response to the federal government’s broken social welfare system and the dereliction of local officials. Juxtaposed with these photos are others documenting the weekly casualties of black men, women, and youth involved in the Panthers’ community programs, all at the hands of a highly militarized local police force. During my work breaks I turn to local and national coverage of our current labor movement only to see photographs of swarms of police, many of whom were recruited by you from the same Bay Area police departments that worked hand in hand with J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI to violently repress the Panthers and their free food programs. On multiple days of the graduate student strike these police arrived in full riot gear and confronted our undergraduate and graduate students, and our faculty with hostility and brutal violence. I’ve seen the videos of officers using excessive force to the point of crushing the bones and ripping open the skin of non-violent protestors, all against the backdrop of Martin Luther King Jr.’s image advertising our school’s annual convocation in his honor and in celebration of Black History Month. 

How can you hold pride in your work at UCSC when your behavior so blatantly contradicts your expressed concern for the well-being of the school’s employees and educators? Without our daily labor UCSC would not exist. Spending over $1 million to line our campus streets with armed police while telling us that you and your colleagues are working with an inadequate and rigid budget is a clear contradiction in discourse and practice. In addition to providing our chancellors with housing stipends the UC also provided at least one of them with an on-campus house, which currently remains unoccupied, all while more and more graduate students are forced to find shelter in their cars. While we take it upon ourselves to ensure that we have roofs over our heads and enough money in our bank accounts to eat, you meet our actions without one iota of concern for our humanity. When your colleagues graciously welcomed the former leaders of the Black Panther Party to speak with our students about the necessity and stakes of their community work in the 1970s, did any of these administrators mention UCSC’s pattern of hiring police squads to surveil and repress student and employee organizers? From what I recall they were conspicuously silent about this history. 

The rising tide of concerns expressed to you by student employees over the past two months is not a product of hyperbolic complaints. Rather, our testimonies point to the reality that our school is in the midst of a crisis. Your celebration of UCSC as an inclusive site of learning when the vast majority of our student population exists in massive debt and lives paycheck to paycheck is dishonest and self-serving. UCSC has become an educational institution for the wealthy. As UC administrators you have an obligation to take care of your students and employees and a responsibility to respect our central roles in maintaining our school as an institution of knowledge production. Over the past few decades UCSC’s institutional priorities have increasingly departed from the school’s early connection to the Bay Area’s civil rights movement and the progressive ideas and projects that came out of it.

My research explores questions of intergenerational relations in social movements, political legacy, and historical memory, and while I read through my chapters I’m reminded that history is chock-full of moments of contradiction, irony, and hypocrisy. Over the past two months you have demonstrated all three phenomena, and to me, that is at once depressing and infuriating.  

As I near the end of my graduate career, I prepare to leave our university unemployed, with few full-time academic job prospects, and thousands of dollars in debt. I checked my bank account this morning and at the moment I have a whopping 54 cents to my name. Do you have any creative ideas that would help me stretch this out enough to cover the cost of printing my chapters for their final round of committee feedback?

As historians we are encouraged to avoid hypotheticals, but it may be worth noting that if I had the chance to pursue a graduate degree at UCSC all over again, I probably would decide against it. Earning an education at this school is no longer financially tenable. 

I sincerely hope that the living and working conditions of future UCSC student workers are drastically better than what my fellow students and I have had to deal with, and what those who came before us experienced. Student poverty at UCSC has reached its breaking point and at this critical juncture it bears repeating that you have both the ability and opportunity to do the right thing.

Lastly, if nothing I’ve expressed in the above paragraphs resonates with you, I will end by reiterating what many have already conveyed to you: the country is watching you right now and waiting to see how you will respond to the needs that our campus community has vocalized to you, loudly and for too long. National media coverage of the current strike by outlets including the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, has been overwhelmingly sympathetic to the plight of UCSC students and our growing movement. How will you add to UCSC’s legacy? 

Sincerely,

Kiran Garcha

(PhD Candidate, Department of History, UCSC)

Dear COLA community, 

TL;DR: 

By any assessment, we are winning this struggle. Graduate students will meet on Tuesday evening, after the sixth day of picketing, for a General Assembly to discuss our response to the latest threats from UCOP (details forthcoming). If you are a graduate student worker withholding grades from Fall 2019, do not submit before this meeting. More than ever, we need to move collectively. First step: organize within your department. See you at the picket on Tuesday, from 7:30am onwards. 

Yesterday evening, our General Assembly concluded with a unanimous decision by strikers and picketers: the strike continues on Tuesday. 

Later that same evening, we received our first communication from UC President Janet Napolitano, with threats to our current and future employment if fall grades are not submitted by next Friday, February 21.

This is a decisive moment in our struggle. As long as graduate students continue to move together, we will undermine these threats, revealing them as a last-ditch scare tactic, a desperate bluff. These threats are credible only if the UC leadership is prepared to sink UCSC and risk indelible consequences to the university at a statewide level. It does not take much to imagine how a mass firing of rent-burdened graduate students on this campus would ignite protest and boycott across the UC system. 

If hundreds of graduate student workers are terminated from employment, whole departments will be unable to offer courses next quarter, dozens of international graduate students will effectively face deportation, UCSC rankings will nosedive, huge sources of funding will be jeopardized, political organizing at other campuses will intensify, and UCSC may become subject to academic boycott (over 1,000 non-UCSC scholars and educators have already committed to a pledge of solidarity and non-cooperation with UCSC). In short, such a move would profoundly impoverish graduate and undergraduate education and research at UCSC, as well as its collaborations and partnerships with other research institutions.

So far, over 200 graduate students have received warning letters from the university for continuing to withhold at least 71% of their Fall 2019 grades beyond February 2nd. Since the start of our full teaching strike, our five-day picket at the base of campus has drawn several hundred graduate students, undergraduates, faculty, lecturers, and staff. The sheer size of the crowd repeatedly filled the university lawn and spilled into the Bay and High intersection, effectively shutting down the major entrance to campus every single day this week. The midweek police presence — excessive in their arms and in their brutality — was visibly scaled down after the masses at the intersection showed that they would not be arrested and beaten into submission. 

Let’s assess the concrete effects of these actions. Collective direct action forced the first round of concessions from the UCSC administration, even if these early concessions (as any student of labor history could have predicted) were grossly inadequate to our demands. Collective direct action has sent administrators scrambling as the university reels from the effects of 12,000 withheld grades: The mobile and arbitrary deadlines for grades—December 18th, February 2nd, and now February 21st—bears witness to the fact that the UCSC administration is unable to compensate for or offset our actions. Collective direct action has revealed the administration’s alleged inability to meet with strikers was in fact and remains a politically motivated refusal. Collective direct action has forced the university to show its hand by unveiling the biggest stick it has at its disposal: Janet Napolitano herself stepping forward from behind the curtain to threaten mass firings. Every move made by UC administrators up to this point has been one failed attempt after another to dilute and diminish the collective power we continue to build.

If we set ourselves the unpleasant task of thinking from the perspective of the UC President, we can conceive of two reasons why the highest level of administration has made a calculated, strategic decision to unveil its biggest threat. The hyperbole of the administration’s current threat of retaliation teaches us not only that ‘they mean business’ but also, and more crucially, that business is their highest priority. While they may be indifferent to our rent burdens, they cannot remain indifferent to the disruptive effects of our withheld labor (and especially of the withheld grades) on the university’s operations. If our mid-January strike poll was any indication, the number of graduate students in favor of withholding Winter 2020 grades (715) holds promise for a disruption on an even greater order of magnitude. Our readiness to escalate is profoundly unsettling for UC leadership. 

But perhaps for them what is even more disconcerting is the writing that’s now undeniably on the wall: the strike is spreading. Kletzer, Larive, Napolitano—the string-pullers behind the riot helmets, batons, and their indiscriminate use—may have been unwilling to administer beatings themselves, but at the drop of a hat they blew an estimated $1.5 million this week on cops from across the state, so that strikers found themselves facing off against police from UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC San Francisco, UC Santa Barbara, and even UC Irvine, not to mention the notorious Alameda County Sheriff’s Office. While the UC system mobilizes its statewide penal resources in the hopes of overwhelming what they see as a local problem, we are strengthened by the proliferation of COLA movements organized by rank and file graduate student workers on at least five other UC campuses. UC Santa Barbara graduate workers will circulate their own strike poll in a matter of days. UC Davis organizers have come to our picket line day after day this week to express solidarity and share reports of the rapid growth of their own COLA campaign. Storms are brewing in mass meetings and rallies at UC San Diego, UCLA, and UC Berkeley. Campus and statewide administrators cannot afford to wait us out, because neither we nor any other COLA movement in the UC show signs of slowing down. The threat of mass firings represents a last, desperate hope that they can crush this movement once and for all. 

In short, the appearance of the university’s most forceful threat of retaliation reveals its position of weakness, while nonetheless pushing the COLA movement to a critical and decisive juncture. In this next week more than any other, graduate students need to organize and act collectively. 

This is a call to organize within your department and with comrades in departments across the academic divisions over the next seven days. 

This is a call to show up at the picket line from 7:30am on Tuesday morning, to make our collective presence felt at the base of campus. 

This is a call to a General Assembly on Tuesday evening, where graduate students will meet to discuss Napolitano’s threats of mass termination, and to decide how to proceed. Many of us are feeling the real weight of these threats, and will each assess considerations of our own as the February 21st grade submission deadline approaches. As we’ve done all along, and as today’s mass email threads have shown, our militant struggle is anchored by a fierce spirit of mutual aid. Our collectivity is our most precious resource and moving together will give us the best chance we have at keeping each other safe. Watch your inbox for more details on the General Assembly. 

Happy Valentine’s Day. Spread the strike. DO NOT SUBMIT.

Love,

Graduate Students Association 

UAW 2865 Santa Cruz

Graduate Students Wildcat Strikers

If you’re talking about “having a critical role in ensuring safety and security to the people on campus”, the only people I know of who were physically hurt in the past week have been undergraduate and graduate students, by police. They have been beaten and bloodied. When we are fighting for housing security, fighting for wages that let us live and thrive here, and taking care of one another, and you are beating the shit out of us and our friends, I think we have the better claim to say that “the safety of everyone in our community is our highest priority”, and not yours.

We provide water and sunscreen to each other, childcare, and medical and legal support (including funds). The cops arrested someone bringing water through, and have consistently blocked supplies.

We also want to “study, … teach, and conduct research”. Grads have made clear that our lack of a COLA presents a significant obstacle to this.

Who do you protect? Who do you serve?